Postcards from Brazil

I've spent the last week in Brazil, doing some talks about NetBeans, how to write plug-ins, etc. And lots of time in airports and planes has provided some chances to work on the new editor hints module for NetBeans (screen shots in blog). What a lovely country!

I've spent the last week in Brazil, doing some talks about NetBeans[2], how to write plug-ins, etc. What a lovely country! And so much enthusiasm for Java, open source and NetBeans!

Having all this time in airports and planes has given me a chance to work on the new editor hints plug-in for NetBeans. This module provides unobtrusive features in the editor that let you add casts, implement methods, lots of cool stuff, while staying mostly out of the way. It when my colleague Jan Lahoda and I both wrote plug-ins to do this sort of thing on the same weekend. So we banged the results together, and started getting more contributions from another community member - so other than merge conflicts because we've all been working fast and furious on it, it's coming along swimmingly. We hope to make it available on the update center soon; with this sort of thing once you lose trust, it's gone forever, so we want to make absolutely sure it's generating good code and not offering to do dumb things before making it available. If you're brave and have a checkout of NetBeans, you can find it in contrib/editorhints and contrib/editorhints/java.

As I said, Brazil is lovely - the climate reminds me of visiting my grandparents in Jackson, Mississippi as a boy - but maybe a bit hotter. And I've met a huge number of Java developers who have been wonderful to talk with and work with - the enthusiasm down here is infectious! And fortunately, there are wonderful beverages to cool off with - just bore hole and insert straw:

I also met Dalibor Topic, who works on Kaffe[3] - and he managed to get Kaffe working from NetBeans (they still need to finish implementing Swing, so you can't run NetBeans itself there - but you can install it as a "platform" and use it as the JVM you run/test in if you want).